FilmFisher Undefended Lists of 2020

While writing for FilmFisher regularly a few years back, I contributed to a monthly feature called “Undefended,” where each writer submitted a top-five list based on a themed prompt. As you can see below, I really got into making these. With the recent relaunch of FilmFisher and its migration to Substack, I thought it would be nice to revisit my Undefended lists and put them all in one place. Here are the ones I created in 2020. Click on the list titles to see the original articles with the other contributors’ lists.

Unloved Gems (February 2020)

1. Topper Returns (Roy Del Ruth, 1941)

2. A Tanú (The Witness) (Péter Bacsó, 1969)

3. Treasure Planet (Ron Clements and John Musker, 2002)

4. The Gospel of John (Philip Saville, 2003)

5. Superman Returns (Bryan Singer, 2006)

Quarantine Recommendations (March 2020)

1. Rear Window (1954): Jimmy Stewart helped catch a murderer while he was stuck at home. What have you accomplished this week?

2. The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (1977) and The Tigger Movie (2000): Two sweet, calming films about loving our neighbors, even when they get on our nerves.

3. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1 (2010): The second act of this film is suddenly deeply relatable.

4. The Wind Rises (2013): A meditation on the fragility and beauty of life.

5. A Hidden Life (2019): This is the perfect film for our moment.

Opening Titles (April 2020)

1. North by Northwest (1959)

2. One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961)

3. To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

4. Babe (1995)

5. You’ve Got Mail (1998)

Dream Adaptations (June 2020)

Each of my picks have been adapted at least once before, but that would not make the following pairings any less exciting:

1. George Orwell’s Animal Farm, directed by Chris Noonan

2. The Gospel of John, directed by Terrence Malick*

3. Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth, directed by Wes Anderson

4. Mark Millar’s Superman: Red Son, directed by Joe Johnston

5. Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, directed by David Yates

*Yes, I did just recommend a Gospel of John adaptation in a recent Undefended list, but when I revisited the film at Easter—sandwiched between viewings of The Tree of Life and The New World—I couldn’t help but think of how much better the film would have been if Malick had directed it.

Scenes from Childhood (July 2020)

1. The girls explore the house and countryside in My Neighbor Totoro (1988). Houses in particular are magical things to a child.

2. I can’t think of a film that better captures the transition from childhood to adolescence than Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989).

3. Harry meets Ron and Hermione on the Hogwarts Express in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (2001). Lifelong friendships begin in wonderfully mundane ways.

4. The snowball fight and the epic dirt-clod fight it foreshadows in Where the Wild Things Are (2009). Nine times out of ten, the most audacious playtime ideas end with someone (often the instigator) in tears.

5. The LEGO Movie (2014) really does feel like it’s being improvised by a child playing in his room.

Old Age (September 2020)

1. Dibs on Up (2009) before someone else inevitably claims it.

2. A Beautiful Mind (2000) has always struck me as the best example of using makeup to age actors, but it’s ultimately Russell Crowe’s incredible performance that makes the effect believable.

3. I know I mention or write about MCU films too much already, probably giving readers the impression I like the films far more than I actually do. Even so, I can’t stop thinking about that beautiful conclusion to Captain America’s story in Avengers: Endgame (2019).

4. Say what you will about the rest of the film, but the first hour of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) is something special. Ford’s professor persona was never better, and there’s an aching wistfulness to those early scenes, especially as we watch the post-war America Indy helped build start to turn on him.

5. Yoda is one of the most iconic elderly characters in all of cinema, but instead of picking The Empire Strikes Back or Return of the Jedi, I’ll go with the final three episodes of Clone Wars Season 6 (2014). Titled “Voices,” “Destiny,” and “Sacrifice,” these episodes send Yoda on a journey of mythic proportions and reveal that, even though he is centuries old and the wisest of all living Jedi, he still has much to learn about the ways of the Force and still has to fight his own flesh.

Monsters (October 2020)

1. Jonathan Brewster in Arsenic and Old Lace (1944)

2. The board game in Jumanji (1995)

3. Judge Frollo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996)

4. Carol in Where the Wild Things Are (2009)

5. The Horde in Split (2017) and Glass (2019)

Hitchcockian (November 2020)

1. The Stranger (1946, dir. Orson Welles). Like Notorious, a 1946 post-war thriller about the complications of marrying a covert Nazi.

2. One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961, dir. Clyde Geronimi, Hamilton Luske, and Wolfgang Reitherman). If Hitchcock had pulled a Wes Anderson and adapted a children’s book into an animated heist film with talking animals, the result couldn’t have been much different than this.

3. Charade (1963, dir. Stanley Donen). A shoe-in for this list, so on-brand you’d be forgiven for thinking it was a Hitchcock film.

4. Mission: Impossible (1996, dir. Brian De Palma). Classic Hollywood elegance and star power? Check. Suspense and paranoia? Check. Wrong man on the run? Check. Train sequence? Check. Echoes of Oedipus? Check check check.

5. Signs (2002, dir. M. Night Shyamalan). I could’ve picked any of the three Shyamalan supernatural thrillers that start with ‘S’, but this one best fits the bill. Hitchcock would’ve come up with a better ending, though.

The Best 5 Films You’ve Seen All Year (December 2020)

1. Unbreakable (2000, dir. M. Night Shyamalan)

2. Minority Report (2002, dir. Steven Spielberg)

3. A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001, dir. Steven Spielberg)

4. The Farewell (2019, dir. Lulu Wang)

5. Tied: Of Machinery and Men Double Feature: First Man (2018, dir. Damien Chazelle) and Ford v. Ferrari (2019, dir. James Mangold)

P.S.: Allow me to use this opportunity to once again beat the drum for the four-part finale of Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2020); if it was a film, and if I hadn’t already included it on a recent list, it would have taken 4th place.

Alan Jacobs on the Humanities

Two posts that Alan Jacobs put on his blog earlier this year keep rattling around in my brain and have helped me articulate for myself why studying the humanities (history, philosophy, literature, and the arts) matters, for all of us, whether we are inside or outside an academic environment.

Here’s his first post, “A Small Parable,” from January 28. The parable is more than half the post, but it I think it falls within “fair use” guidelines to quote in full.

Once there was a man named Jack who owned a nice house. One day, though, Jack noticed that one end of the house was a little lower than it had been. You could place a ball on the floor and it would slowly roll towards that end. Jack was a practical man, so he called Neil, another practical man he knew, who worked in construction. Neil said that he could jack up that end of the house and make everything level again. Jack agreed, and Neil got to work.

Jack had a neighbor named Hugh. Hugh was interested in many things, and watched closely as Neil jacked up the low end of the house. With Jack’s permission, he looked around the basement of the house. All this made him more curious, so he walked down to the town’s Records Office and got some information about Jack’s house: when it had been built, who had built it, and what the land had been used for before. Hugh also learned a few things about the soil composition in their neighborhood and its geological character.

Hugh paid Jack a visit so he could tell Jack about all he had learned. He stood at Jack’s door with his hands full of documents and photographs, and rang the bell. But when Jack answered he told Hugh that he didn’t have time to look at documents and photographs. He had a very immediate problem: that end of his house was sinking again. In such circumstances Jack certainly couldn’t attend to Hugh’s ragbag of information and discourses about ancient history. After all, Jack was a practical man.

When parents, employers, teachers, and school administrators emphasize degrees or courses in “practical” subjects like Business and Engineering at the expense of degrees or courses in subjects like English or Classics, they risk falling into the same shortsightedness as Jack. Practical classes can help us learn what is possible, but they aren’t as good at helping us discern what is beneficial. To quote Dr. Ian Malcolm from Spielberg’s Jurassic Park, “your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should.” Studying the humanities, as the name implies, is about studying what it means to be human. Once we better understand what makes for true human flourishing, we’ll be in a better position to judge whether X business strategy (no matter how lucrative) or Y technology (no matter how efficient) is really conducive to our human flourishing in the longterm.

I love the Sara Groves song, “Scientists in Japan.” The chorus goes:

Who's gonna stay here and think about it?
Who's gonna stay?
Everybody's left the room,
There's no one here to talk it through,
Now stay, stay, stay.

Whether it’s in a high school or college classroom, or a book club, or a discussion with friends after watching a movie together, engaging with the humanities is a way for us to slow down and “stay here and think about it.” 

This post of mine is long enough already, so I’ll write about the other Alan Jacobs post another time.

They Also Serve Who Only Stand and Wait

Timothy Lawrence and I have wondered whether George Lucas had ever read C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man and whether it influenced Star Wars. But now I’m also wondering whether he ever read Lewis’s That Hideous Strength and whether it influenced his contributions to Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark. 

Initially this thought occurred to me because both the novel and the film have a group of villains, who, to help them take over the world, try to harness a higher power, even though this is at odds with their ideology. The anti-Christian N.I.C.E. wants to use Merlin for his magic, but magic is antithetical to their stated scientism, and Merlin, it turns out, is a Christian. The anti-Jewish Nazis want to use the Ark of the Covenant, which necessitates that they perform a “Jewish ritual.” In the violent finales of both the novel and the film, the cynical, impious villains are destroyed by the very power they sought.

But that last point of overlap led me to consider what may be a more important thematic connection between That Hideous Strength and Raiders. The fact is that neither Dr. Ransom and Co. nor Dr. Jones and Co. have to do almost anything to foil the N.I.C.E. or the Nazis. Dr. Ransom sends people to find Merlin before the N.I.C.E. do, but Merlin finds him. All Ransom does is instruct Merlin what to do and present him to the eldils so they give Merlin the power to destroy the N.I.C.E. And, as some plot-hole sleuths are quick to point out as if it were a weakness of the film, the outcome of Raiders would have been the same no matter what Indy did or didn’t do. He could have stayed home.

But to think that Raiders was supposed to be about Indy defeating the Nazis and instead he turns out to be useless is to entirely miss the point. The great revelation at the end is that the God of Israel does not need any man’s help to defeat His enemies. The point is that Indy moves from, as Tim puts it, “fram[ing] his search for the Ark in purely material, rational terms” to “at least [having] enough holy fear” to know to close his eyes when the Ark is opened. What if Indy is there, not to save the day, but to learn firsthand that our God is in the heavens and He does all that He pleases (Ps. 115:3)?

Ransom’s skeptic friend MacPhee would share Indy’s disdain for “superstitious hocus pocus,” and he’s also the kind of person who would make the above complaint about Raiders of the Lost Ark. In That Hideous Strength, he doesn’t understand why Ransom’s strategy for countering the N.I.C.E. is so passive, so deferential to the eldils (whom MacPhee does not believe in), and so much like just living ordinary lives. He says at one point, “It may have occurred to you to wonder, Mrs. Studdock, how any man in his senses thinks we’re going to defeat a powerful conspiracy by sitting here growing winter vegetables and training performing bears. [OK, that last part isn’t so ordinary.] It is a question I have propounded on more than one occasion. The answer is always the same; we’re waiting for orders” (p. 189 in the Scribner 2003 edition).

Then, after Merlin has overthrown the N.I.C.E., MacPhee seems to wonder whether he, too, could have stayed home. He says, “I’d be greatly obliged if any one would tell me what we have done—always apart from feeding the pigs and raising some very decent vegetables.” To which Ransom replies, “You have done what was required of you … You have obeyed and waited” (368). Ransom’s response reminds me of the last line of Milton’s sonnet “On His Blindness”: “They also serve who only stand and wait.” Waiting on God and being ready to act at a moment’s notice is itself a form of action.

Besides, what MacPhee doesn’t see is that the communal life being cultivated at Ransom’s Manor at St. Anne’s is a valuable form of resistance to the cruel, manipulative culture of the N.I.C.E. HQ at Belbury. At Belbury, animals and people are tortured; at St. Anne’s, they are rehabilitated. At Belbury, people are used and turned on each other; at St. Anne’s, they are cared for and submit to one another in love and respect. I like Jake Meador’s recent observation at Mere Orthodoxy that the community at St. Anne’s is practicing something like the Benedict Option, which is say that Lewis puts the emphasis on spiritual formation within Christian community instead of on political action. 

It may seem like Indiana Jones is superfluous in his own story, or like the only characters that matter on the side of the good guys are Ransom and Merlin. Likewise, we may question what good it does to follow Paul’s command to lead quiet lives (1 Thess. 4:13) in a world of so much noise, when maybe we could try pulling the levers of political power to bring it down a few decibels. I say all this not to endorse quietism, but to ask whether we trust that God has the power to vindicate His justice in His own time and in His own way, and whether we are striving to first be faithful in the little things He entrusts to us, things as simple as growing winter vegetables.